NUCLEAR WASTE

Peter GornerCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Radioactive nuclear waste is the deadliest substance on Earth, yet most people have only a vague idea of what it is. It poses a threat because each year more and more of it is produced--and it will endure for centuries because no one has figured out how to get rid of it.

No expert can accurately assess the seriousness of the threat, or even document how much waste exists, let alone where all of it is.

Such conclusions are drawn from a 2 1/2-year study by Donald Barlett and James Steele, the Philadelphia Inquirer`s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative team. They are the first to try to put together the story of the complex and often lunatic 40-year struggle to deal with the enigma of nuclear garbage.

In an odyssey that took them 20,000 miles and sent them wading through 125,000 pages of documents, the reporters uncovered chaos--case after case of bureaucratic bungling--and a dismal litany of duplicity, false hopes, false promises. And they sound an ominous warning.

''The most serious danger,'' Steele says, ''is not that people will be exposed to danger at a waste-storage center, or that a power plant will blow up, or that some horrible transportation mishap will occur. What worries us most is that the material will work its way into the food chain and the water supply, and people will consume it. That`s not a big bang theory of history, but a very subtle process that takes years.''

''Some experts,'' observes Barlett dryly (Barlett observes almost everything dryly), ''again are suggesting that we stash nuclear waste in the Antarctic or blast it into space. Those ideas were dismissed before. The polar ice cap might melt and raise the oceans. A space ship might explode on takeoff.

''However, other innovative waste-management suggestions have included wrapping radioactive fuel assemblies in plastic bags, dynamiting burial grounds that have started to leak, and sopping up spills with kitty litter.'' Cheap shots at a beleaguered industry? The reporters have chronicled these and many other such suggestions in a controversial new book,

''Forevermore: Nuclear Waste in America'' (Norton, $17.95), which has reviewers lined up on all sides. Some are calling Barlett and Steele alarmists and naive. The technology is here to solve the problem, they say, if only the politicians will let them get on with their work. Other critics are applauding the book and saying that it`s about time people got mad.

''Steele and I are not against nuclear power,'' Barlett insists, ''but the truth is that nobody knows what to do with the waste, despite a lot of promises and reassurances. The rhetoric today is the same as it was 40 years ago. It`s eerie when you read it. And the political process has broken down in Washington, where this problem must be solved. That`s where it was created.

''You can`t blame the electric utilities, which produce most of the waste. Forty years ago, the federal government almost forced them to get into the nuclear business and promised to take care of the used fuel rods. That subsidy was unprecedented. The utilities went ahead. Then the government reneged on the junk. Now, even the most pro-nuclear states are fighting to avoid becoming dumps. Who can blame them?''

The reporters point out that virtually all the known radioactive waste ever produced is kept at stopgap facilities.

''Indeed,'' Barlett notes, ''science, government and industry have given new meaning to the word ''temporary.'' Waste in 1985 is held in temporary facilities, just as it was in 1945, just as it will be in 2005.''

The legal wrangling in Illinois about storage from other states typifies the problem, the reporters say. Illinois` nine nuclear reactors--the most of any state--generate about 30 percent of Illinois` electricity. Illinois ranks third nationally in the volume of wastes produced by its nuclear plants and other facilities, accounting for 16 percent of all the used fuel assemblies in the nation. Most are stored at the reactor sites; all of Commonwealth Edison`s are.

Few state officials, however, are happy about Illinois also being home to the nation`s only high-level waste depot--the 15-acre General Electric Co. disposal site near Morris, in Grundy County. The facility represents a $64 million failure to commercially reprocess used nuclear fuel. A design flaw forced its conversion into a nuclear warehouse.

Surrounded by high fences and tight security, hundreds of metric tons of highly radioactive fuel lie underwater in a huge indoor pool. Most of those rods came from power plants in California, Wisconsin and Connecticut.

Critics view Morris, only 63 miles from the Loop, as an accident just waiting to happen and as a stopgap likely to become permanent, leaving Illinois a nuclear dumping ground for the nation. Illinois already stores more California waste than California does.

Why do we have nuclear waste? The deadly garbage is an unavoidable part of nuclear fission. When the nucleus of an atom splits, a vast amount of energy escapes as protons and neutrons are scattered. In an atomic bomb, the unchecked process explodes. In a nuclear reactor, however, the speed of the reaction and the rate at which energy is released are carefully controlled. The energy is given off in the form of heat, which is used to raise steam to drive electricity generator turbines.

Most modern reactors are fueled by pellets of uranium (about the size of pencil erasers) sealed in long metal rods approximately one-half inch in diamater and up to 13 feet long bundled together into fuel assemblies. The number of rods in an assembly may vary from 63 to 264. When a neutron strikes a uranium nucleus, the nucleus splits in two, producing additional neutrons that split more uranium nuclei, setting off a chain reaction.

However, waste products also accumulate inside the rods and ''steal''

neutrons from the uranium. As less uranium is split, the reaction slows, making the rods less useful as power producers. Thus, at least a third of a reactor`s fuel rods must be replaced each year, even though they still contain 90 per cent of their original uranium. The rods still are intensely radioactive.

To absorb the radioactivity and shield the surroundings, the assemblies are stored underwater in steel-lined pools of reinforced concrete several feet thick. These ''biological shields'' were never designed for permanent storage. Yet more than two-thirds of the nation`s utilities have re-racked their pools, wedging the heavy assemblies closer together, trying to cram more in until a permanent solution is found.

The government`s record keeping is so inept, Barlett and Steele charge, that officials don`t even know how many rods exist. As one example, they cite a confusing series of reports from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

In 1982, the NRC said 3,512 assemblies were stored at Commonwealth Edison`s Dresden plant. Two months later, in February of 1983, only 1,873 assemblies were there, according to the NRC. Somehow, 1,639 assemblies had disappeared.

By March, however, NRC records reported that the number had climbed back to 2,880--''still 632 short, but getting better,'' Steele says. By May, the NRC said the number had dropped to 2,054.

''NRC spokesmen had no explanation for their figures,'' Steele says. ''An incredulous spokesman for Commonwealth Edison told us the discrepancy was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard of. Of course, the number of used fuel assemblies keeps rising.

''Not only do the numbers go up, but each assembly has its own serial number so the government can keep an accurate accounting of the most deadly waste ever accumulated. That the NRC`s record keeping is out of balance is only one measure of the anarchy that marks America`s efforts to control radioactive nuclear waste.''

The utilities are in urgent need of a permanent solution, the reporters say. In 1960, no used fuel rods were in storage. A decade later, there were only 36,000. By 1980, more than 3.4 million rods had been placed in storage basins. The number is expected to swell to nearly 14 million in 1990 and to 30 million at the turn of the century.

By that time waste stockpiles are expected to hold enough radiation to kill everyone on Earth, the reporters say. They concede that the possibility of mass human contact is remote, but they point out that there already is enough plutonium in used fuel rods stored at power plants to produce more than 10,000 atomic bombs, creating a security nightmare.

Low-level nuclear waste, far more voluminous, is another mess, the reporters say. The government doesn`t keep accurate track of it; wildcatters even have taken to scouring the country, conning communities into permitting dump sites, then leaving town before the leaking starts.

''Low-level waste is a catchall term referring basically to everything except the fuel rods,'' Barlett says. ''Much of it is not dangerous, especially the minimal waste produced by nuclear medicine. But some of it is highly radioactive.''

The reporters are harshly critical of shallow land burial of low-level waste in rainy regions. Since the early 1960s, much of this waste has been buried at six commercial dumps, including a 20-acre atomic graveyard near Sheffield, 125 miles southwest of Chicago. Trenches at Sheffield have been collapsing, and the site was closed in 1967. However, large depressions keep occurring, and by 1982 radioactive tritium had flowed off the property and contaminated adjoining land.

Various solutions have been proposed to stabilize the situation. They include dropping giant weights to compact the earth, using pile drivers to shake things up, or destroying the site with explosives. All have been dismissed as too risky.

''As indeed they are,'' Steele says. ''Low-level cemeteries are frequently described as containing only slightly contaminated old gloves and lab coats. Well, the materials at Sheffield include 34 pounds of plutonium and 70 pounds of enriched uranium. Blown into the atmosphere by an explosion, the plutonium would cause cancer or death in every American who breathed it.''

The failure at Sheffield is not unusual, the reporters say. Radioactive waste, when buried, rarely behaves as it is supposed to. For one thing, it does not stay put.

Steele: ''In Kentucky, when the federal government put low-level waste at Maxey Flats, the assumption was that you could store deadly plutonium in earth trenches and the radioactive substance would spread only a half-inch every 24,000 years.

''As it turned out, the plutonium has moved (contaminated) several hundred feet in nine years. Plutonium has been moving elsewhere, too. At West Valley, N.Y., test wells showed that kerosene mixed with plutonium have traveled more than 50 feet.''

Adds Barlett: ''This stuff had been mixed with kitty litter in hopes that it wouldn`t move. That didn`t work, either.''

Solutions to such problems have been mired in debates among physicists, geologists, engineers, regulators and legislators, Barlett and Steele say. Old ideas keep being trotted out, though systematic testing has not occurred. Meanwhile politicians keep juggling the hot potato to protect their states.

Unless some workable plan can be devised, the reporters say, nuclear waste will be stored for a century in some 200 cities and towns. Many areas will be permanently uninhabitable. Tens of billions of dollars will be spent correcting past errors and present mistakes. And the threat of sabotage, radioactive poisoning, birth defects, cancers and other tragedies will not go away.

Yet the only solution the reporters see--and they call it ''absurd''--is the federal government`s crash program to construct permanent waste depositories under ground.

''They want to get it out of sight, out of mind,'' Steele says. ''The technologies have not been tested on a large scale. Nobody knows for sure what will happen to this stuff.''

''They`re no closer to solving this problem now than they were 30 years ago,'' Barlett says.

In the 1960s, federal officials said a repository would open in the early 1970s.